Is Glastonbury getting older?

I wondered whether the acts playing Glastonbury are noticeably older than they used to be. So I found out.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I was wondering, in a Whatsapp group with some friends (as much wondering is done these days) whether it’s true that the acts playing Glastonbury are getting older.

So I decided to find out. This, I should say, is highly unscientific, and there are various caveats to the data. But I reckon it stands up reasonably well.

A note: I used to go to a lot of gigs, but I’ve never been all that interested in Glastonbury, so I have no particular bias, in either direction, regarding whether the trends depicted are good, or bad, or happy, or sad, or whether they tell us anything about the state of the nation. I enjoy the sound of modern Glastonbury on the BBC as much as I enjoyed the sound of 1990s Glastonbury on Channel 4. I was just interested in the answer to the question.

That answer looks like it is: yes, headliners are getting older. That may or may not be obvious, but I still found the data interesting (skip to the charts below if you want to get to the good stuff).

Here’s the main source, along with each act’s own Wikipedia pages.

Here is the average age of acts to have headlined Glastonbury on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of each festival since 1992, on the Main Stage (the Pyramid for almost all the listed years) and the Other (second) Stage.

“Headlined” in this case means “is listed most prominently on the Wikipedia page for that year’s festival. And it goes back to 1992 because there was no festival in 1991 and Wikipedia doesn’t list Other Stage headliners for 1990, and I didn’t think it was worth going looking, for the sake of this meager “research”.

Where acts have more than one member, I’ve taken a rough average of their listed years of birth. Where that isn’t listed I’ve used the ages of those members who are listed. Where there are large age differences within acts, I’ve used the ages of the most prominent members, or the most frequent ages. I’ll admit that this is quite wishy-washy, but it wouldn’t skew the data all that much if you were to collect the exact ages.

Here’s the average number of years since each of those headliners rose to prominence:

Caveats: I’ve had to use a bit of leeway here. New Order more or less became prominent as soon as they formed in 1980, whereas did Ladysmith Black Mambazo become prominent in the 1960s or the 1980s? Fortunately the latter question didn’t arise because LBM played in 1990 and I decided not to include that year, for this and other reasons. You’ll have to accept my definitions of “prominence”, but again I don’t think exact dates, were we able to agree that such things existed, would make very much difference.

Here’s the age data in a time-series chart, including linear trend lines:

And here’s the prominence data in the same format

Here, also, is the size (number of members) of each act (similar caveats re Wikipedia and my definitions of who’s in or not in the group), because one of the group asked about it. I don’t find it all that interesting so I haven’t made a time series chart but, eyeballing it, there seems to be a shift towards smaller/solo acts, which probably reflects modern pop sensibilities.